Sometimes the most visible things are the hardest ones to see, especially if they have been around for nearly 90 years and long ago taken for granted.

That, in brief, is what has happened to the Civic Center, perhaps the most important green space in Denver – 16 acres that link the City & County Building and state Capitol and tie the cultural complex to downtown.

Efforts are underway to refurbish, rethink and rejuvenate the aging park, boosting its profile and transforming it into a more desirable destination by improving accessibility and security and giving residents and tourists more reasons to visit.

In 2005, the Denver Parks & Recreation Department created a master plan for Civic Center. It established guidelines for any improvements and listed $41.4 million in needed improvements, ranging from $870,000 for restoration of historic balustrades and columns to $2.5 million for a central gathering area.

The plan is endorsed by most interested parties, but the question of how it should be carried out has generated enormous, often emotional debate.

“This is a very beloved place,” said Kathleen Brooker, president of the preservation group Historic Denver. “I’ve been doing this since 1992, and in terms of preservation issues, this has probably generated the most intense and persistent public involvement.”

Off to a rocky start

Fueling the controversy has been the Civic Center Conservancy’s August unveiling of a conceptual design for the park’s overhaul by Daniel Libeskind, who oversaw the unorthodox addition to the Denver Art Museum that juts commandingly toward the park.

While leaders of the nonprofit conservancy, established two years ago to help maintain and upgrade the park, insist it just wanted to generate discussion with Libeskind’s ideas, others were not so sure.

Many were concerned with what they saw as secrecy and a sense of fait accompli surrounding the design. They worried it would be endorsed by Parks & Recreation with only lip service to public participation in the decision-making.

Kim Bailey, manager of Parks & Recreation, acknowledges the implementation of the master plan got off to a “rocky start.” Tepid public involvement in the master plan left organizers unprepared for the huge outcry that greeted Libeskind’s design, she said.

“When it did erupt, for lack of a better word,” she said, “it took us all by surprise, and (it) was by no means ever the intent to give a perception of secrecy or that things were going to be approved behind closed doors. We would never get away with that.”

Libeskind’s design

Then there was the concept itself, which took a high-tech, ultra-contemporary approach that seem incongruous with the park’s historic, neo-classical character. Mayor John Hickenlooper suggested it could cost more than $100 million, though no price tag was affixed.

Libeskind’s ideas and the way his design was conceived raised the alarm of many organizations, such as Historic Denver. Ad-hoc watchdog groups were launched, including the Civic Center Friends, which has created a blog and sent a protest petition to Hickenlooper.

Patricia O’Leary, a founder of the Friends, said she is somewhat reassured by the public meetings that have occurred since the design’s release.

“I definitely feel more comfortable from the days when we embarked on this,” she said. “We and a whole bunch of people in the city made it their point that they’re not enamored of this plan.”

But Brooker said her suspicions of the process have not been totally allayed. She remains unconvinced that Libeskind’s much-maligned design has been put aside.

“I’m still waiting for Kim Bailey to say that and I’m not hearing that,” she said. “I’m really anxious for them to come forward with some sort of clear statement that they’re not going to go that way.”

On Jan. 11, Parks & Recreation is scheduled to present a report to its advisory board summarizing what has occurred since the release of Libeskind’s concept and laying out public priorities.

What will happen after that? No one really knows. Dennis Humphries, an architect who serves as vice-president of the conservancy, said projects in the park will probably happen one at a time, with architects chosen for each as money becomes available from public and private sources.

He thinks it might be possible to fund the renovation of the McNichols Civic Center Building (something nearly everyone agrees on) as part of a citywide bond issue under consideration. Ideas for the former Carnegie library include a terrace restaurant, visitors center or some kind of museum.

Quiet space, or “active”?

As the discussion moves forward, here are some thoughts on some key aspects of Civic Center’s facelift:

What should a renewed Civic Center be like? There has been much talk of diminishing drug dealing and vagrancy by “activating” the park, but it is not clear what that means exactly. Before any improvements can be undertaken, it seems obvious that a precise definition is essential.

Two extremes seem to have emerged. Some people want to turn the park into a kind of bustling space teeming with people at all hours – an approach that has been derided by skeptics as “circuslike.” Others want it to stay largely as it is now, a quiet space with only scattered visitors much of the time.

The appropriate amout of activity is probably somewhere in the middle. Civic Center is a dignified and, in many ways, formal space, and should not be another Washington Park, where hundreds of people can be seen running and walking dogs on any Saturday in the summer.

At the same time, the Denver needs to rethink the use of Civic Center as a site for virtually every summer festival, closing streets around it and significantly damaging area businesses cut off from their customers.

While Civic Center is the obvious site for a visit by a president or as the termination point of the city’s annual Martin Luther King Day parade, many of the other festivals should be shifted to other, more suitable locations in the city, such as Commons Park or perhaps the Six Flags Elitch Gardens site if it ceases to be an amusement park.

What is the relationship of Civic Center to Commons Park? Too often, Civic Center is considered in terms of its immediate surroundings and not in the downtown context as a whole. While it has a unique position in the cityscape, the space is not the only large, high-visibility downtown park.

As a kind of bookend on the other end of the 16th Street Mall in the Central Platte Valley is Commons Park, a new kind of civic center. The 19-acre space sits alongside probably the fastest-growing part of downtown, and its importance as a focal point will only grow as the area booms.

In considering Civic Center’s future, it seems imperative to consider its future connection to this obvious counterpart. How will the two evolve and change? What activities are best suited to each? What kind of amenities make sense for each?

What should Civic Center look like? It is critical to preserve the historic, neo-classical character of the park and even restore, as the master plan prescribes, some of the original aspects of Edward Bennett’s 1918 design that have been lost over time.

At the same time, preservation should not mean freezing the park in the past. New construction of kiosks or other architectural elements should not employ some faux-classical style but should speak to the 21st century just as Bennett’s design spoke to his time.

That does not mean imposing the new onto the old, as many people rightly saw Libeskind’s vision doing, but creating sensitive contemporary designs that respect and acknowledge the park’s history while also refreshing and updating it.

What should happen next? If the next step has not yet been decided, it is clear that the process must be transparent. This is a public park, after all, and the public needs to be involved every step of the way.

That doesn’t mean paying lip service to the notion of openness by holding public hearings and then carrying out whatever a handful of insiders want to do. It means listening and being willing to compromise – the two essential elements of democracy.

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